Conventional handheld optical systems that contain a direct view optical path along with night viewing and laser range finding capability suffer from several drawbacks and disadvantages. Most currently fielded military handheld devices are multiple aperture systems utilizing refractive or glass components. These systems are heavy due to the number of components needed to support multiple apertures and the use of exclusively refractive optical components, and suffer from boresight retention problems which result in range finding errors. In particular, such systems tend to be too heavy to be operational effective especially when locating relatively small targets, the weight inducing unacceptable hand held jitter. U.S. Pat. No. 6,020,994 to Cook discloses a common aperture solution; however, this system is not scalable in terms of magnification. In addition, in conventional common aperture solutions, additional beamsplitter(s) and blocking mirror/plate (typically positioned at a 45° angle) required to allow the optical paths to share the common aperture force the package width or height to an unacceptable size for many handheld applications. In some larger aperture systems that are not handheld, where large refractive components would make the system expensive and heavy, reflective telescope assemblies have been incorporated to replace the refractive components. However, implementing light weight reflective technology into handheld optical systems has not been accomplished.